Hannah Fisk - January 24, 1983

Finding Niece II

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She was...

Sixteen years old. She's born in 1942. Now she's forty, forty-one. Uh well, they start inquiring. Okay? My two brothers. Didn't tell about nothing but me. So one day we took the rabbi, we send him back to Poland. And he came into that--Mrs. Łączkowska, and he made a date with my niece. And uh, when she went back from school, he waited for her and he told her the whole story. "Listen kid, you're not Polish. You're born to Jewish people. Your name is Monczyk, you got two uncles from your father. They live in New York. They're very wealthy." You have to put stories on, you know?

Mm-hm.

"And we want you to come back to New York 'cause you're not going to have nothing here in Poland."

Mm-hm.

But she used to tell me that when she went to school they used to call her Jew. So she came home crying to her mother and she says, "Mama, why they call me Jew?" She says, "Because all the Jews dark complected, they have black eyes, you know. And that's all." But when she find out that she's Jewish, she says for some reason she had a different attitude, a different heart, a different feeling, you know.

Yeah.

So, he told her the whole story and then he says, "Now it's up to you." And she says, "Look, I'm going in my last two years gymnasium. When I finish my schooling, I'm going to decide what I want to do." Stay with her mother or go to New--to America. I'm just giving you briefly. Sure enough, she was 18 years old, we couldn't bring her here, 'cause it takes a, a while to make papers and to go to adopt her back on Monczyk, you know?

Sure.

So I went to the lawyer and the lawyer gave me a good idea. He says, "You know what? You bring her here continuously to go to school." You know. That she comes here as a, as a student and she can come ???. My brother went twice, three times a week to Washington, D.C. to try to adopt her back on Monczyk. See? Say that's my brother's child, she belong to me, she belong to us. And that was going on and on. Finally when she came, thank God, we adopt her. She lives in West Bloomfield, she has three beautiful children.

[interruption in interview]

...I came to get her and I brought her here. And she met her husband, she had three lovely kids. Got two, two kids already in uh, Ann Arbor. Got a daughter, 19, a son, 18, and a little girl, 17. And that's the story.

Did she ever see her...

Oh yeah.

...the people who raised her, the Polish woman who raised her?

Oh yeah. She goes back there very often. Oh yeah. That's her mother, there's no question about it because it wouldn't be for her, she wouldn't be here. She wouldn't be alive. She was a nice human being anyway because a lots of Polack took, take the money and take everything and they say to the German, "Here's a Jew." But she was a different human being, that's all. She happen to be an old little lady but she goes back to see her, that's her mother.